The general threat to all varieties of Quechua is very much the classic
one menacing so many indigenous, largely unwritten and rural languages, faced
by competition from a European (former colonial) language of far greater
prestige, in this case Spanish. As a brief but very telling indication of
the real status and socio-linguistic position of Quechua, consider the
following citation from an article by the Quechua linguist Alberto Escobar:

Some years ago I had the opportunity to converse, in the
[Peruvian] education ministry, with the official responsible for … recommending
changes to state education policy. Among these changes, particular
importance was supposedly attached to those envisaged for the rural areas of
the country… ‘The Indians’, said [the official from the education
ministry], ‘need brainwashing so they forget Quechua’.

Admittedly that was a few decades ago now, but it is actually only
very recently that official attitudes to Quechua seem to have begun to improve
a little (see below). For centuries, native Andean languages have been in
general retreat throughout the Andes (barring a few cases of Quechua spreading
by internal migration, even occasionally gaining at the expense of more minor
native languages). During the twentieth century, however, and
particularly its latter half, the situation took a distinct turn much for the
worse. Step by step with the ever deeper, indeed accelerating,
penetration of westernised ways of life and culture into traditional life in
the Andean countries, the decline of Andean languages has rapidly accelerated.

Recent decades have seen a huge expansion, into smaller and
smaller Andean communities, of the money economy, formal education, roads,
telecommunications and media, all of which are almost exclusively Spanish‑language
environments. These powerful and no doubt irreversible social changes in
Andean society pose an immediate and extremely serious threat to even the major
surviving varieties of Andean languages: in the last thirty years Cuzco
itself has gone from being a heavily Quechua‑speaking city to one in
which it is overwhelmingly the minority language on the streets.

[Cochabamba, in Bolivia, appears to be one exception to this
trend: a major city where Quechua is still a real living language, fairly
widely spoken (even if already far less commonly heard than Spanish in the city
centre), including by young generations completely bilingual in Spanish.Their Quechua is fairly heavily laced with
Spanish influences, but this can arguably also be seen a sign of its vitality
and how it has adapted to remain a ‘modern’ language compatible with a fairly westernised,
urban lifestyle. As such it has perhaps a better chance of survival than
many supposedly ‘purer’ varieties of Quechua.]

The impact of mass western tourism has probably also had a net
negative effect on Quechua, since almost no tourists speak any Quechua
whatsoever, but many speak at least some Spanish. And since tourism
represents a major earner for many Peruvians, access to yet another source of
work and money comes essentially through Spanish, not Quechua.

However, there is a flip side to all this. In recent
decades, again particularly with the growth of international tourism, and the
money and jobs it brings into the Peruvian economy, there has been something of
a resurgence in pride among indigenous Andean peoples in their native
heritage. This covers both the physical remains of world-renowned
archaeological sites such as Machu Picchu, Cuzco, Nazca (and hundreds more), as
well as social traits, Andean art, textiles,
traditional beliefs, and not least their traditional fiestas
(many with ancient indigenous roots, grafted onto Spanish Catholic
festivities). It is this heritage that is undoubtedly the major
attraction for international tourists, who head massively for the Cuzco region,
much more so than Lima, which many tend to avoid. Machu Picchu is
arguably a better known name worldwide than is Lima.

Particularly in the Cuzco area, this has had a considerable effect
in raising the self-esteem of indigenous Andean communities – perhaps the
election in 2001 of a Peruvian President of indigenous origins (Alejandro
Toledo) will have a similar effect (unless things go so badly that the reverse
happens…).

As yet, however, all of this has generally failed to rub off
significantly in perceptions of native Andean languages– despite the
blatantly obvious fact that the language spoken by the people who built all the
wonderful Inca sites so widely admired in the world was of course none other
than Quechua.

Nonetheless, n recent decades there have been growing, if still
small, efforts to achieve the same raising of prestige for native Andean
languages. This involved first of all establishing official orthographies
for certain of the Andean language varieties, so that they could at least be
written. During a brief period of state interest in the early 1970s, the
Peruvian Education Ministry promoted a series of linguistic descriptive
grammars and basic dictionaries (bilingual with Spanish) of six Peruvian
varieties of Quechua, published in 1976 before the Sendero Luminoso terrorism
took hold. However, official attitudes soon cooled markedly, with a
prejudiced officialdom suspicious of Quechua‑speakers, often
automatically assuming them to be potential supporters of the rising terrorist
groups (something of a mockery of the truth). Thankfully the terrorist
threat has now all but vanished, this perception has likewise receded, and
there is a new window of opportunity to promote Quechua, perhaps the last before
it is really too late. The new Toledo government is proposing a
significant expansion of education in Quechua, though it is too early to tell
if this will make any real difference.

There have been also moves to introduce Quechua as a language of
education, though this remains on a very small scale, generally limited to
particularly remote village schools. And in any case so far this has
generally only been achieved for the major surviving varieties, such as Cuzco
and Ayacucho Quechua in Peru. Even for them, these efforts still appear
to be having little significant effect in slowing the decline of Quechua, let
alone halting or reversing it.

The actual number of Quechua-speakers is hard to calculate, since
it depends on two opposing tendencies.

•·The first is the general
decline through Quechua-speaking parents deliberately not passing the language
on to their children, speaking to them in Spanish instead, and even punishing
them for speaking Quechua. This is reinforced by Spanish-only or at least
very much Spanish-dominant education. This is a very common scenario in
most towns of any size, and in an increasing number of more and more remote
villages.

•·On the other hand, the
few, more remote areas where the language is still being passed on to children
are generally characterised by a high birth rate, and thus a fast-growing
population in the rural Quechua-speaking heartlands.However, many of these people emigrate to the
towns and cities, where they are likely to join the masses of people abandoning
Quechua and not passing it on to later generations.

It is difficult to
estimate the relative importance of these trends, so as to arrive at a clear
picture of how many people still speak Quechua, or how fast it is
declining.

As for hard figures on numbers of speakers, for most Andean
languages, especially the most endangered varieties, they are fairly if not
extremely difficult to come by. Those that are available tend to show
wide discrepancies and are often quite contradictory.

Published estimates for the total number of speakers of all
Quechua varieties, for instance, range from anywhere from around five million
to very dubious claims of up to fifteen million (those at the lower end are by
far the more plausible). Cerrón-Palomino (1987) in his book Lingüística quechua
discusses figures from various sources, and comes up with a total number of
8,354,125 (!) speakers, broken down by country as in the table below (the
percentage figures are for Quechua-speakers as a proportion of the total
population of that country):

Peru

4,402,023

= 19%

Ecuador

2,233,000

= 23%

Bolivia

1,594,000

= 25%

Argentina

120,000

= 0.3%

Colombia, Brazil and Chile barely exceed 5,000 speakers
combined. Other linguists, more recently, have tended to give lower
estimates, of the order of six to seven million. Remember too that
Cerrón-Palomino’s figures are from 1987 in any case.

Perhaps the best resource available for more up-to-date figures,
at least for Peru, is the new Atlas Lingüístico del Perú (Chirinos Rivera 2001) based on
data from the latest population census in Peru in the 1990s. This will be
quoted below where the data can be assumed to be reliable enough to be
meaningful. As the author himself admits, though, he has had considerable
difficulty in interpreting much of the language data.

For instance, the census recorded pockets of Aymara (!) speakers
in the northern Peruvian Andes and the Amazon, data which are quite patently
mistaken, almost certainly through minority Quechua varieties being mis‑classified
as Aymara. This itself is a telling indication of how astonishingly
little most Peruvians – even highly educated ones – know about the indigenous
languages spoken in their country. That the census-takers can entertain
the notion of Aymara, rather than Quechua, being spoken in many such areas is
astonishing, and suggests that they simply do not realise that there is any
difference between the two, a common enough confusion among Peruvians who know
neither of them. One other explanation may even be plausible: so
strong is the feeling of lack of worth of indigenous languages, and so little
the firm knowledge about them, that it is conceivable that in particularly
remote areas, speakers themselves may be confused as to whether the language
they speak is a form of Quechua or Aymara.

The census data on remote and highly threatened languages are
particularly unreliable, given how little ‘reach’ the census‑takers had
into remoter villages. For the Jaqaru language (of the Jaqi/Aru/Aymara
family), for instance, Chirinos Rivera (2001: 121)
reports only 33 speakers, while it is clear that there are in the order of two
thousand. The census-takers probably never made it to all the others –
after all, it is a tough six-hour hike from the nearest dirt road to reach
their villages.

What is indisputable, however, is that in relative terms,
as a proportion of the national, and even regional population, Quechua is
constantly declining. Here lies a very real danger of the language
becoming more and more marginalised and reduced to more and more remote places,
increasingly isolated from each other.

While the major dialects like Cuzco or Ayacucho Quechua can still
count many hundreds of thousands of speakers, its relative importance is in fairly
rapid decline, and its future prospects are grim. In just a few years, if
nothing serious is done to change radically and for good the prevailing
low-prestige perceptions of the language among Peruvians – Quechua-speakers and
non-speakers alike – even the current bastions of the major dialects could slip
ever more rapidly down the slope towards eventual extinction within a few
generations. I find it quite plausible that in two generations’ time
Quechua will have less than half or even a quarter the number of speakers it
has today, and today’s major dialects will be facing the bleak, if not utterly
hopeless future of today’s minor, dying dialects.

For the more dialects, indeed, very little has been done at
all. Many such Quechua varieties remain very under‑researched, with
little or no linguistic materials published on them. This is particularly
true of the most endangered varieties. Given that the so‑called
Quechua I (or Quechua B) sub‑family is very highly fragmented, for many
endangered forms, the most that is available is a basic grammar and dictionary
of a more major variety within the same broad dialect, but in fact
significantly different from the endangered variety in question.

Socially, many of these communities are already show the classic
signs of languages on the way out.Their
situation is critical, and the threat of total extinction very real and
imminent.

The level of threat varies from variety to variety, and given the
unreliability of such data as are available, there is little point in
attempting to detail here the exact situation facing each of the multitude of
minor Quechua dialects in danger of extinction. As an illustration, it
should be sufficient to consider the following data and citations from the Atlas Lingüístico del Perú
by Chirinos Rivera (2001), much of
which reads like a litany of dying languages.

For the Pacaraos variety of Quechua, Chirinos Rivera records
a mere 8 speakers, half of them already over age 65 (pg. 120). For
Cajamarca Quechua, the total recorded number of speakers in the whole province
has already fallen under 10,000, and only in two of fifteen districts is it
spoken by more than 10% of the population (pg. 76). Cajamarca
Quechua is generally described as “in extinction” (pg. 167). San
Martín Quechua exhibits in general “a high index of substitution in favour of
Spanish” and is “a language in retreat”, or in certain areas is already “in the
process of extinction” (pg. 158). Yauyos Quechua too is “in the
process of extinction”, which is “irreversible” (pg. 120), while Yaru
Quechua is likewise “in a situation of extinction” (pg. 103), except in
the remotest high‑mountain areas.